Joe Armstrong is a co-inventor of Erlang. When at the Ericsson computer science lab in 1986, he was part of the team who designed and implemented the first version of Erlang. He has written several Erlang books including Programming Erlang Software for a Concurrent World. Joe held the first ever Erlang course and has taught Erlang to hundreds of programmers and held many lectures and keynotes describing the technology.

Joe has a PhD in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is an expert in the construction of fault tolerant systems. Joe was the chief software architect of the project which produced the Erlang OTP system. He has worked as an entrepreneur in one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail) and has worked for 30 years in industry and research.

Favourite quote: "... or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts."

The three of us (Joe, Robert and Mike) have more than 100 years combined experience of programming. We have noticed the vast majority of software development projects use programming languages based on concepts which were developed close on a half a century ago. Tools and development environments have changed, but with few exceptions the basic paradigms remain the same.

We will reflect on our experience, what is good, what is bad and what is ugly. How did the past and our experience influence us when we developed Erlang.